Inside and out. Lots on youtube called inside the chieftons hatch. Inside the chieftons hatch. Or theres this video cast on cspans American History tv, ladies and gentlemen, nicholas moran. Unfortunately, thats about as high up as it goes. Good evening. Oh, boy. So todays talk is on world war ii procurement and why the sherman was what it was. Thats the best i could come up with when i was asked to give a talk. War games and tanks are the people that asked me to come out here. If youre interested in tank games, world of tanks is great, its not a reisraelirealistic s, so on that i would like to thank them for inviting me out here. And i have high end personnel. I do not have any letters after my name. I do not teach at a university. I work for an unrealistic video game. Id like to thank them for taking the gamble and bringing this guy out who has no history whatsoever to give you guys a talk. However, despite the disreputable background as far as the academics are concerned, i do promise you that everything in here is either sourced for the archives is as accurate as i can make it. Im hoping this thing will actually come across. Well see. If cspan cant hear me, im sure they will mention it. The background, initially i was asked to come here and do my myths of american armor talk. I had to think about it. Its on youtube. If you want to listen to it, go to youtube. Google mitts of American Army and youll find it. I do some of the Common Misconceptions and basically said, look, these are common and they are wrong. Because i had already given a talk, i said lets modify it a little bit and instead of how good was the tank well go with why is the tank the way it is. Thats the theory behind this. I dont know your knowledge level. Again, some of these speakers ive heard here on the podcast are very high end, but every now and then its good to just go back to some of the low levels and make sure that the fundamentals are still good. So, audience participation question number one. The rifle is the m1. What was better out in service, common service, than the m1 as a rifle . Pretty much nothing. You can make an argument maybe for the 44 but it wasnt as common. The m1 was probably the best piece of equipment of its type in the world and the u. S. Produced it. What was a better fighter than the mustang, a better destroyer than the garing, a better carrier than the essex, a better artillery fuse than the vt . We have the best. Landbased fighter. [inaudible] or the noncombat stuff. No other country had the handy talky. The cckw, some people say the higgins boat won the war. Some people say the jeep won the war. The victory ship. The record i think was six days in california. You can go on and on. With a couple of exceptions, the other countries had their own areas of expertise. We didnt touch the british with topography and some of the radar. The british had us. The germans had a few advantages and so forth. But as a general rule, anything that the u. S. Went to war with was the best in the world that was out there. What happened . How did we go from the best at pretty much everything to this . Im going to argue that we actually did not get it wrong and there were very specific decisions made in the u. S. As to why the m4 ended up the way that it was and over the course of the next hour or so ive been asked to try to keep it to less than 60 minutes. I dont think ill make it but ill try. Hopefully you guys will get an understanding of the levels of thought that went into the design process. Audience participation question number two. Hands up for the chicken. Who votes the chicken . Who votes the egg . In 2006, the university of norwich concluded it was the egg. However, that finding was later reversed by the universities of sheffield and warwick in 2010. In a paper entitled structural control of an egg protein, indicates that the answer to the chicken or egg question is the chicken. I bet youve learned something this evening. My mission is complete. Now, why do i ask . Any guesses . Sir . [inaudible] looking forward in history versus looking back in hindsi t hindsight . How would that apply to this talk . Most people are looking back an hearing what people are saying about it as opposed to looking at it at the moment it is being designed. Thats an excellent point. Its not the answer to this question but it is a very good point. I was mentioning earlier talking about british Army Operations in Northern Ireland which to an extent i lived through but then i did an assessment last year for the army and its very interesting the different perspectives if youre involved in the matter or dealing with it after the fact objectively. Sir . [inaudible] youre getting there. [inaudible] thats deep. That is very deep. Heres your chicken and heres your egg. On the left side is a symbol for army grand forces. These are the guys who develop doctrine. They equipped the force. On the righthand side is the bomb of Ordinance Branch which are the guys who developed the equipment. So, the question is, should doctrine match the technology that is being created or should technology be geared towards meeting whatever the doctrine requires . So heres your next question. Audience participation question number three. Who thinks that doctrine drives the technological design . Who thinks that the Technology Drives what the doctrine does . A few more people. Who doesnt care . This is who i refer to as the Mad Scientist of the u. S. Army. He comes up with wonderful designs and pieces of equipment and believes that he knows better than anybody else what the army needs. To quote him, it is not well understood that tactics are usually written around a weapon. Field operations normally do not generate ideas leading to new material. A new piece of equipment must first be produced, for example a machine gun, before the tactics can be devised for the weapon. For these reasons its necessary for the Ordinance Department to take a strong lead in the development of new equipment and to get the help of those services to determine where the weapon best fits into battlefield operations. So if you talked to ordinance, Technology Drives doctrine. Its kind of hard to argue the fact that, well, how can you know how to use a machine gun if you didnt know that such a capability exists. However, this is what army grand forces thought. The bottom line here is that army grand forces would draw up the specifications and they would then be submitted to ordinance and ordinance would then Design Equipment to match what army grand forces wanted the equipment to do. The quote is from the written history of army grand forces. I have a picture of him up there. In 1940 army grand forces didnt exist as an entity but well keep that aside. If youre curious, we have the users saying that theyre in charge. You have the developers saying that theyre in charge. Both have reasonable arguments. If youre curious, this is the process today. Ive had to learn this and im very glad im not involved in procurement. This is the army side of it. If you can understand this, youre a better man than i. But the bottom line is that in todays military it is driven by the operational needs, not by the technology. So you start off with lets say an operational needs statement such as for example the 30 millimeter strikers that are now fielded in europe. This came from the field, the second brigade said we need vehicles with a cannon capable of engaging mps. Then the engineers built them the vehicle. Such operational need statements did exist in world war ii. For example, there was one i saw that says we want a device that you can fit onto a tank that when its driving along at at least 15 Miles Per Hour it will detect the mine field before it hits the mine. Now, we havent really gotten to that today but these requests were being fielded from the field to ordinance. A lot of times ordinance did develop material which met the requirements of the fielding force. But again, i digress. The bottom line is that ordinance thought they were the head. Before world war ii, you can see what the equipment of the army was and it was terrible. Basically the u. S. Was starting from scratch. Reduced to its simplest terms, the problem is to determine the kinds of equipment which will be needed most and could be manufactured in the required hundreds, thousands or millions in time to be of use. Again, thats a quote from agf. Note in time to be of use. You cant hang around waiting for the Perfect Piece of equipment. In january of 1940, in a lecture before the army industrial college, the then chief of ordinance, Major General westin estimated that the development of a major item of material required a minimum of three years from requirement to fielding. Now, in war, they cut that down to usually one and a half to two years, sometimes even as little as one. This timeline generally matches with the development of any piece of equipment developed by anybody else, the british, germans, russians. About one and a half to two years. Yes, audience participation question number four. In one word each, what are the two biggest problems facing the United States as it prepared to fight world war ii . Production . Logistics . Shipping . You guys are very close. Youre bouncing around the right idea. Isolation . Bingo. The two problems are called atlantic and pacific. Anything being built to fight is going to fight many thousands of miles away and a couple of oceans from the nearest factory. It has to get there and when it is there it must also be sustained. This means you need to have as few parts break as possible in order to reduce the need for spares to be shipped over, the need to ship those spares and then youve got all the consumables like pol across the ocean. Note also that unlike the germans who could if they had to do a refush on a tank, they could ship it back to the factory, so could the soviets. We could not. Anything we sent over was there to fight until it was discarded or destroyed. Major repair in the u. S. Is not an option. You have to think about the entire chain from the factory floor to the battlefield. Heres an example of one of the problems. In 1948 there were 12,122 flack cars in the United States that could carry a persian tank. In may of 48 they wanted to get a battalion from fort knox to kentucky. It took 48 cars. How many flack cars were capable of carrying a 45 to 50ton tank and Everything Else that had to be carried to get to the ship . Then when you got to the shipyard, you have liberty ships that weve been building once every ten days. What is the lifting capacity of a liberty ship crane . If you make the 60ton monsters, can you actually get it to the fight . Arguably you probably could but could you get them in sufficient numbers to have an effect . In the simplest words, what use is having the best equipment in the world if you cant get it to the fight, or if it gets to the fight and then it breaks down. No use. You just wasted all that shipping, all that effort to get a tank overseas just to see it break down and sitting in the Third Armor Division motor pool or wherever. Thats some of the basic problems. Lets get down to some of the nuts and bolts. Im going to quote army grand forces. Agf established two general criteria for the development and approval of new equipment. The first is genuine battle need. It was reluctant to initiate development of any equipment not considered essential to increase combat efficiency. It tended to oppose development of new equipment which though perhaps desired by the men in the field was not absolutely essential and might prove to simply be a luxury or excess baggage. This was a clearcut policy of general mcnair, one which he often emphasized. It was eventually adopted formally as War Department policy. Who determines battle need, who determines what is an essential piece of equipment versus what is a luxury equipment. One school of thought said the theatre commanders. The other school of thought said that the decision should be centralized in the u. S. Who thinks they went with theatre commanders . Who thinks they went with centralized decision in the u. S. . You are all wrong. [inaudible] i see where youre going on that. That was done centrally, yes, but once it was set up we will have so much personnel and tanks, the all nature of those tanks, improvements to them was not centralized. I should explain. So the reasoning from the idea behind the guys who wanted to centralize was that theatre commanders might be too strongly influenced by the limiting local conditions of their own tactical situation to exercise proper overall judgment which seems a little bit distrusting in the vague reasoning of four star generals. They also believed that theatre commander recommendations from colored by the combat soldiers natural attachment to Reliable Equipment with which they were familiar. Basically they were worried that the troops in the field were very happy with what they had and would not request additional equipment. There is some evidence to support this. For example, witness six Armor Division in october of 44 who reported that they had received no 76 millimeter tanks and had no particular desire for any. The 75 had gotten all the way across france, why rock the boat. What they had was working. Now, the War Department and to a large extent mcnair went with the former view. They did not produce and ship material overseas unless the end users were asking for it. So even if the guys in d. C. Thought this was a great tank and it should be shipped overseas, they asked the commanders in europe and north africa. If they said no, the equipment did not go overseas. So the second criterion, reliable performance in combat, this standard sometimes referred to as battle worthiness, meant that the equipment having been proved capable of performing the function for which it was designed was sufficiently rugged and reliable to withstand the rigors of combat Service Without imposing excessive problems of maintenance. Again, excessive problems. The thing would break down, it will happen. There is perhaps a subcategory which i would call immediate capability. Army Ground Forces was willing to accept subcapable equipment if it was the case of that or nothing, but it still had to be reliable. Cases in point, there will be your Tank Destroyers, m3 or m10. So, the situation of tanks, so what we have is an m2 medium that the u. S. Started the war with. You can see it needs a fair bit of track tension here. The u. S. Had at the time what is called the cult of the machine gun. The infantry were owning the tanks. The calvary had combat cars. They were basically tanks. The infantry were quite interested in the tanks ability to deal with enemy infantry. As you can see, machine guns everywhere, deflectors on the back here so you fire out. It would deflect off this and shoot down to the trench that you were walking past. The 37, that was an antitank gun and trained for antitank capability. Somebody figured out if we have a tank, they might bring a tank and we have to be able to kill their tank. But the main weapon was the machine gun and this tank was limited to 15 tons by policy because that was the average weight of an American Railroad bridge at the time. Road bridge, im sorry. So, in 1939, the u. S. Conducted a series of tests to determine if machine guns or a 75 millimeter would be more effective at killing infantry. Survey says, 75 millimeter. Good to know. What they have done is added a 75 into the hull of an m2 medium. It should start perhaps looking a bit familiar. Then this happened. That is a photograph taken. The germans very quickly overrun france. A couple of lessons are taken by the u. S. From this. Firstly, a 37 millimeter is not going to cut it in the antitank roll. You need something bigger. Fortunately, they had already tested the 75 millimeter. Fantastic. The second problem this is where the lecture is going to take a fork into two tracks. They created Tank Destroyers as a result. So were going to talk about not only why the sherman was designed the way it was but briefly about the tds. Solution, build m3s. You take that m2 and that 75 and add a couple more gadgets and youve made an m3. Nothing in this tank is particularly new. Its always improving on something that they know already works. This is the sort of thinking which will dominate Army Development and procurement for the next while. They built detroit arsenal. If you dont know who this ka nudson man is, look him up. He talks to chrysler and together they built the army detroit tank. Initially the army only wanted 350 m3s. The problem was that the russians and the british were in such demand for these tanks that they couldnt stop producing m3s to switch to the m4, so they built about 6500 of them. Something similar happened with the six pounder. The british six pounder was developed before world war ii, but after the fall of france they realized we can either not produce antitank guns or we just built a two pounder. The soviets were saying the t 34 was supposed to be replaced by the t 34 m. It didnt happen, germans invaded, well go with what we have. So there were gradual improvements on the m3 in the form of new stabilizers. Some came with cast hulls so the army is getting experience with a cast hull tank. Of interest in terms of design, barnes was not in favor of keeping that 75 millimeter. Infantry who at the time still was in charge demanded that the 37 be we takretained so thats still have a 37. I said this was going to break into two different directions. Then you had the question of how do you stop these pansers. What was happening obviously was not working. The idea of having antitank guns with your front line, with the infantry, was not working. The solution was you had to cut these off for a loss. Theres no way you could put enough antitank guns to stop a concentrated armor attack. The solution was to have mobile rapid antitank guns that could meet the enemy attack at the point of penetration and the idea was that these would beat up all the tanks. Hence, you have the Tank Destroyer branch. If you look at the manuals, the doctrine, they were never t